Waking More: Valve Greenlights 13 New Games

Share this:

Like somewhat rusty clockwork, the not entirely predictable Steam Greenlight machine has whirred to life again – granting the wishes of hopeful developers who dared perform the dark rituals needed to invoke its promotional might. This time around, 13 games made the cut, and – as is becoming a happy trend – it’s a fairly diverse selection. Well-ish known standouts include Waking Mars, Primordia, and StarForge. Oh, also, there’s productivity software this time too, so thrill to that. (How does one thrill to something? I’ve never understood that phrase.)

The full list of newly greenlit games is as follows:

Blackspace

Darkfall Unholy Wars

Dawn of Fantasy

Dragon’s Lair

Euro Truck Simulator 2

Gear Up

Kinetic Void – Space Adventure

The Light

No Time To Explain

Primordia

Sang-Froid : Tales of Werewolves

StarForge

Waking Mars

I’m quite pleased to see Waking Mars and Primordia on there, as both are utterly delightful and deserve far, far wider recognition. StarForge’s star-bound forgery/shootery/lootery, meanwhile, probably takes the cake for most ambition. I’ve also been interested in Sang-Froid‘s frigid/froigid take on, um, wolf defense for a little while now, and Kinectic Void was doing exceedingly promising space game Kickstarters before it was cool. Also, those two rhyme, and I actually didn’t do that on purpose. Oh, and let’s not forget Euro Truck Simulator 2, because I wouldn’t be surprised if it was actually the Citizen Kane of games.

Now then, how about that productivity software, eh? First, GET PUMPED, and then read these names: Action! Screen Recorder, Bandicam: Game Recorder, Construct 2, Display Fusion, HitFilm 2, and You Need A Budget 4. That last one, especially, I feel like I’ll have trouble with, as I haven’t experienced the gripping narrative arc of Need A Budgets 1-3. Oh well.

At any rate, see anything you like? Also, what do you think should be next? Plenty of games have been criminally overlooked by Steam’s various selection processes, but which ones should be counted as felonies?

68 Comments

Blackspace’s Kickstarter clearly helped it score well in Greenlighting. Given that the game itself finished well short of it’s $350K funding goal, however, the game is very clearly a long way away from being made, if ever.

Surely Greenlight should be about games that are a little closer to being actual, finished games?

There’s a pretty big difference between betas from bigtime developers and betas from unknown indies. DotA2 beta is obviously going to be on Steam because Valve is developing it, and Don’t Starve is by Klei Entertainment of Shank/Mark of the Ninja/Eets fame. Both of these games can be reasonably expected to come out in working order because the developers have some credibility; the same cannot be said for indie developers without significant pedigree (i.e. a large number of Greenlight participants).

While Steam is a great platform for beta releases because it can push updates frequently and quickly, I think there should be some more requirements for putting alpha/beta games on Steam Greenlight. It’s perfectly fine to say “We’re working on this game, vote for us so you can eventually buy it on Steam and/or get early access to the beta” but debacles like what happened with Towns make me question the value of allowing unfinished indie games into the system.

Towns was greenlit and made available at whatever its then-current build was. I just started it up and it reports v8a.

But yes, it was released in an alpha state and drew the ire of many because the store page gave absolutely no indication that the game is not done. They’ve since added this initial line to the description in the store: “Towns is continually being developed and updated to bring you the best experience possible!”

The rest of the description, and especially the screenshots, remain a bit deceptive with regards to the current state of the game.

Now that it’s been greenlit, it obviously will be. The devs have been pretty clear that it was a major goal for them.

I agree, it’s very good. It’s a bit sad to see all the negative comments about it, from people who obviously haven’t played it and just automatically dismiss it because it’s about what they perceive as a boring theme and has the word “simulator” in the title.

If Steam keeps the current release rate those games will never make it. There are more than 10 good games added per month so it’s likely that a lot of games will NEVER reach the top ten and will forever stay buried.

Games that should definitely get greenlit:
Gas Guzzlers (combat racer), Syder Arcade (horizontal shmup), Toki HD Remake (platformer)…
I have created a steam list where I list ~80 promising games that are on Greenlight…
and a video called “19 Greenlight Games in 2 Minutes”link to steamcommunity.com

I stumbled upon the game via a YouTuber called phreakindee (aka LazyGameReviews). He tested the game and did some Duke Nukem voice acting during his review…
Then after the devs saw his video they asked him if he would be interested in doing some Duke Nukem voice overs…. He said yes and reported about it here.link to lazygamereviews.wordpress.com

Anyway….it would be really good if the game would get greenlit because combat racers on PC are pretty rare….and being on Steam would mean there would be enough people online for multiplayer matches.

i am slighty wary of blackspace, re it’s tower defense allusions – i think the tech they’ve developed would be more applicable to a straight up awesome rts/supcom type game, & was disappointed during their kickstarter that they talked about setting up your base then defending against various swarms/hoards of enemies approaching from designated directions. altho, it’s entirely possible i might just be biased towards wanting a conventional rts with fully destructible terrain however

We thought we’d give Greenlight a shot as something of an experiment, as we really had no idea whether high end video software would be a good fit with Steam. Exciting that Valve think so (or think the community thinks so…), and it’ll be interesting to see what happens.

The curious thing is that in the post-production world we come from, HitFilm 2’s price is extremely competitive. But on Steam, surrounded by games which rarely go above £40 (even the other productivity software tends to all be sub-£100), HitFilm 2 is in a very different context. Source Filmmaker’s success at least indicates that a strong filmmaking community already exists, but it’s going to be fascinating to find out what kind of response we get.

(I work at FXhome, the developers of HitFilm 2, in case that wasn’t obvious!)

Happy for Primordia, Blackspace and The Light. Will also be following Starforge and Waking Mars, those might turn out nice. Sadly, they skipped my favourites again. I mean, seriously, some nice but early concepts and the likes of Euro Truck Simulator 2 (with all due respect) or Yogventures previously over Drakensang: the River of Time? Keeping my fingers crossed for Age of Decadence, Eador, Cradle, Alea Jacta Est to make it on the list next time but the way people vote/Valve greenlight titles makes a bit worried.

Well, Drakensang is in the uncomfortable position that (despite being an excellent and commercially released game) it is already on Steam. Yes, I understand that it’s not on Steam for all regions and the Greenlight entry is to try to fix that. But that’s likely to get significantly less interest and attention than getting stuff onto Steam at all.

Blackspace looks amazing to me, I can’t wait.
I just bought Miner Wars 2081, it’s pretty awesome but needs a lot of polish still.
I was iffy about the only online stuff but at least for me, it’s been no big issue.

I only remember thumbs-upping Sang-froid and Waking Mars from this batch, but now that I see how frequently this is happening I’m not worried about the chances of my favorites like Eador, MaK and Dungeon Dashers (though it looks like Escape Goat might never make it…). So, no criminal oversights here, I reckon.

… so i’m not saying that valve should be running things differently or anything like that, but really?

2 point and click games, one of which was made over 10 or 20 years ago apparently.

-A game which looks kind of like a halo rip-off.

– an interactive story… thing.

– A minecraft clone.. IN HD! (to be honest i did vote for this one, but only because it looked to be the best minecraft clone i’d seen on greenlight so far)

-A truck simulation game. admittedly it does look quite well made, but very dull at the same time.

-A game that i think was available on newgrounds for free not too long ago, made in flash. (No time to explain)

Those games do look okay, but really, they’re not games that i’d have imagined would have been among the first to be released via greenlight. Maybe later on. There’s plenty of other games on greenlight that i’ve seen that actually look more unique and more interesting than quite a few of those titles in that list, such as omegalodon, dino run SE and so on.

It is still in the early stages of production, so that might be a black mark in the eyes of some, but its concept is basically “multiplayer Alien”. Note the distinct lack of ‘s’ on that last word. So it has the potential to be my dream game, the game which, if I had the proper skills and profession, I would be making right now.

A more interesting selection than the previous one, for sure. It is frustrating to see unfinished games get prioritised over finished ones, but then Greenlight isn’t about that. That game “The Light” concerns me though, given that the trailer is using Thomas Newman’s “Road to Perdition” soundtrack uncredited, and I’m 99.9% certain the guy wouldn’t have been able to afford the license! Does Steam normally endorse such dodgy stuff?

No La Mulana, no Pinball Arcade, no Retrobooster, no Syder Arcade. Sigh. Interesting to see Primordia get on there this time, showing that Steam isn’t selecting the top X titles but rather choosing trends (Primoria was rocketing up the charts, but was around the top 40 by the time it was Greenlit, pleasantly surprising the devs).

“Unfortunately my “% towards being top 100″ falls a little bit each week, currently at 63%. I can’t really keep up with the level of traffic of other games it seems. I think to get Greenlight level support you need a massive army of fans. My recent release of Soulcaster on Newgrounds has generated a good amount of traffic, so if I can somehow harness that to build a community for all my games, I might stand a chance. I appreciate your support!”
-MagicalTimeBean [author]

While I didn’t vote for everything that was approved this round, and some I think just aren’t for my tastes, I am really happy about a few of those.

More importantly I really like this thread. Not so much that there are so many good games that haven’t gotten the greenlight, but that there is a great list of some favorites that I have now gone through and voted for and can now keep an eye on.

Thanks everyone for the suggestions, I’ll toss out one of my own so hopefully some others give it some love: